Victoria Lindt
by Lavanya Six
Summary: AU. Glory Girl lives out Hellhound's childhood.


_Based on the web serial "Worm" by wildbow._

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**Victoria Lindt**

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**2.**

When Victoria Lindt is nine, her mother leaves their apartment one day and never comes back.

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**3.**

The CPS workers call her a borderline feral child. Victoria isn't sure what that means, but experience has taught her that grownups talking in hushed tones is never good.

It's only years later, randomly, while working her way through a dinner plate of 'complimentary' pancakes, that the nuance of them not caring about her being within earshot sinks in. Victoria loses her appetite at that point. The heavily tattooed short-order cook she's been charming starts dicing onions to cover for inexplicable tears.

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**4.**

Home One is wood paneled walls, well-trod carpeting, and good intentions.

The man and woman watching her try to get Victoria to call them mom and dad, but her mom is still out there somewhere, no matter what her caseworker insists. Having a sister is pretty cool, though. It's all very weird and new.

Victoria tries to keep smiling; that usually worked on her mom's party guests.

It isn't long before small things start to go missing around the house. Some cookies. A pair of earrings. Books. A watch. One day, Victoria catches her sister taking money out of their "mom's" purse. Their eyes meet. Victoria doesn't say anything. You can't tattle on your sister. Sisters stick together, like in her cartoons.

A few days later, Victoria takes out her school books to find the pages torn up. She wants to rip out the pages sometimes, because the books are hard, but that would be bad. When the teachers take her aside to explain, she can't—or rather, won't.

When she gets home, the people watching her don't want to talk about the torn books. They want to talk about the missing things she's been hoarding under her mattress.

Victoria tries to explain.

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**5.**

Home Two is bunk beds and long, dark nights.

She has three sisters and a brother, now. Her disciplinarian foster-parents insist they all call them mom and dad. It's not a happy family. At first, Victoria lets herself be battered between the moods of her foster-siblings, who all want different things. She tries playing peacemaker. That... proves to be a terrible mistake, one she doesn't dare repeat.

Victoria Lindt realizes then, really for the first time, what not being good with people means.

The next three years whittles away the naivety in her. She's smaller, younger, and weaker than all of her foster-siblings. Victoria learns there's an advantage in that position. Her foster-siblings are blunt and direct, like their foster-parents. Victoria works with that.

As she haltingly pieces together remedial vocab and grammar lessons at school, Victoria makes sure not to show off her new skills at home, or overly in class. It becomes a fun game to do math in her head while scratching out incorrect longhand on her worksheets.

She still can't tell when one of her foster-siblings is playing her off the others, but being a bad little soldier doesn't earn her many slaps or shoves anymore. Now, disobeying even direct orders to _get me this_ or _plant that there_ just gets huffs and eye rolls.

No one expects much from her. She meets expectations.

By the time she is eleven, her foster siblings have shared a lifetime's worth of blonde jokes.

By the time she's twelve, they start cracking new jokes.

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**6.**

Puberty hits Victoria Lindt like a sledgehammer. She jumps four inches in just one summer, but with money tight she's stuck wearing her old clothes. Even her hand-me-down dresses have embarrassingly short hemlines, given the shortness of her foster-siblings and her own sudden height. She sticks to old pants that pinch her waist and leave a length of ankle bare. Victoria also starts wearing a bra larger than her next oldest foster-sibling.

She doesn't stop growing in either direction.

Unlike the previous year and a half, Victoria earns attention despite her apparent haplessness.

Her foster-sisters get snittier, meaner; she's not a little kid underfoot anymore. It gradually dawns on Victoria that they think she's competition. Most of the girls in her classes either envy Victoria or sneer at her. It grates, but she can't show how it bothers her without the whole protective facade crumbling.

Boys look at her in an altogether different way. Her foster-brother is one of them.

One night when she's fourteen and he's sixteen, Victoria—

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**7.**

"Hey? Vee? Earth to Vee."

He reaches out to shake her shoul—

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**8.**

Victoria, huddling under a thermal blanket, watches as the paramedics wheel her foster-brother into an ambulance. Gauze and bandages cover where his eyes used to be.

"It's not your fault," everyone tells her afterward.

_No fucking shit_, she thinks.

Despite what Victoria tells the police, and later tearfully explains to the judge, her foster-brother didn't even try to force anything. Partly because she never gave him the chance. Partly because he honestly thought she was dumb enough to just go along with what he said; how they they were going to... meet-up... after curfew.

He simply didn't expect her to not to go with the flow. He took Victoria's utter quiet for her having a blonde moment, not being inwardly terrified about his intentions.

What an asshole.

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**9.**

"It's not your fault," everyone tells her afterward.

They still send her away. They send her to Home Three.

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**10.**

The red pen freezes mid-flourish.

Victoria's latest foster-mother looks up across the table at her. The other two kids at the kitchen table stiffen in their high-backed chairs at the disruption of their nightly homework review. Victoria's heart races when the gaunt woman stands suddenly and walks out.

Outside in the dark, the crickets chirp loudly. None of them dare fidget in their chairs, but they glance nervously quickly at one another.

It's two or three minutes before their foster-mother walks back, a teacher's textbook in hand. She never lets them see it. She uses it to double-check their work, but does so by studying the problems beforehand.

"Victoria," her foster-mother says, "do you want to hear something funny?"

"Sure?"

For some reason, her foster-siblings suddenly look like they want to murder her.

_Flip. Flip. Flip._

Her foster-mother pages through the textbook. Finally, she fingers something in the lesson. Victoria can't make it out exactly, viewing the page upside down, but it's one of the example problems from the current module. "I thought so," their foster-mother whispers to herself. Then, to Victoria, she says, "You make the exact same mistakes they show in the demonstrations of what not to do. Exact. That's pretty amazing."

"I... y-yeah?"

Her foster-mother stares at her.

Then, the red pen dances again. This time the capped end jumps back and forth between Victoria's homework paper and the textbook examples.

"Mistakes Three, Two, One. All your wrong answers follow that pattern. Three, Two, One." Her foster-mother gently closes the textbook. "If I went through your old homework papers, do you think I'd see more of that?"

Victoria says nothing.

Her foster-mother slides a clean sheet of paper across the table.

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**11.**

The caseworker practically floats into the air when he sees her report card. It's too late for honor roll in junior high. Her GPA is garbage. But starting in high school?

Her foster-mother smiles a little at the caseworker's gushing, and for one terrible moment Victoria is filled with the urge to claw the bitch's eyes out. Instead she grips her chair's armrests.

"—iano lessons starting next week."

Victoria blinks. This is news to her.

"That's wonderful!" The caseworker looks to Victoria. "I never knew you were musically inclined."

"Oh, you'd be surprised with what Victoria is capable of."

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**12.**

School during the day. Tutoring in the afternoon. Piano lessons in the evening.

Never in her life has Victoria worked so hard. Her waking hours begin to bleed together, and her foster-mother won't tolerate her falling behind in any of her studies. Even yawning at the table is enough to get her dinner tossed into the garbage.

The trouble with liars, Victoria realizes too late, is that you can't really believe them even when they start telling you the truth. Before, her foster-mother was almost kind, as far as she can be kind. Tolerant, maybe? Victoria isn't like the two other foster kids sharing the house. She isn't normally violent. She doesn't willfully disobey the rules. If she breaks them, it's because there's a nicety that isn't apparent, one of those little obvious things that everyone else takes for granted: when not to laugh, when someone will and will not be upset if you ask them a question, and so on.

Now, she's "playing games" when she gets a B.

Now, she's "being lazy" if she has free time.

The day she's sent to school with orders to join the basketball team, Victoria cries on the bus.

But she doesn't dare complain. Not when her foster-mother shoos her out of bed to go running at sixty-thirty every morning as part of her training, or to shoot hoops after dinner.

By the time of her first game—

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**13.**

By their first game, Victoria's teammates have had just about enough of her.

Good looks, good grades, good manners, good at basketball, good at everything she tries. The model foster child, rising above her troubled past with effortless ease.

Ha.

Reading an inspirational story is way fucking easier than living one. Victoria doesn't catch everything, but there's enough dirty looks sent her way, enough whispers just as she walks by certain desks during class, that the message comes through loud and clear.

It's barely a surprise when her own team fouls her, costing them a basket that first game. It's no surprise at all that nobody helps her up off the ground. Sitting on the courtside bleachers, her foster-mother sees exactly what's going on and nods approvingly.

She nods approvingly, Victoria suddenly realizes, because _all this_ was the whole poi—

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**14.**

.

.

.

.

.

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**15.**

"Ha ha ha ha ha... HA HA HA HA!"

The gym isn't completely silent. Some people are pointing and whispering, not that Victoria cares. Others are rustling through their coats and purses for cell phones. Victoria lets them. Her true audience is one woman.

She floats closer, to loom over her.

"How's it feel to be life's bitch, _bitch_?"

Victoria doesn't wait for her foster-mother to pick her jaw off the floor. Instead, she zooms for the nearest door and—

—well, she meant to slow down and open it up, but apparently she's invulnerable.

Good to know.

As far as inflicting an ironic lesson in one's limitations, Victoria decides as she soars away into the open sky to do whatever she fucking well pleases, her foster-mother couldn't fail harder.

That thought keeps her warm and smiling all the way to the next state over.

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**1.**

Holding a paper napkin with her bony fingers, Taylor pads grease from wide, thin lips. "I know it's kind of cliche, but when people with powers get together, isn't it kind of standard to share origin stories?"

"Ooo! Me first!"

The rest of her teammates stare at Victoria.

"What?"


End file.
